As Apple starts a new era, mine comes to an end

My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turnaround in terms of products at all. Beyond the release of the iconic “Think Different” ad campaign, there was nothing.

Apple’s survival hung by a thread. Steve Jobs asked everyone to trust him. At Macworld Expo, he had enlisted Bill Gates–Bill Gates, of all people!–to help him instill belief in the world that Apple would find a way to survive.

The world was skeptical, to say the least. My family asked what job I thought I’d get once Apple went out of business. The magazine I had worked at for four years, MacUser, had folded, and some of us had been transferred over to our rival, Macworld, presumably to publish issues until Apple finally gave up the ghost and died. We existed to minimize the loss exposure of our respective publishing companies.

1997 was weird, folks. And that’s how my tenure at Macworld started.

It got better

Of course, in 1998, Apple announced and shipped the iMac, and its fortunes began to turn around. Mac OS X finally appeared in the early 2000s, and it is still the foundation of every device Apple makes. Somehow, Apple found a way to fashion a new Mac OS out of NeXTSTEP while maintaining enough Mac compatibility to keep users and software developers on the platform–a magic trick that I still don’t think gets enough credit in Apple’s turnaround.

Covering Apple during the first decade of this century was like blasting off into space on a rocket. In a breathtakingly short amount of time, doom and gloom were replaced by a rain of improbable success stories, from the iPod to the revitalization of the Mac to the success of Apple retail stores to the really big one, the iPhone.

But every story, even the really good ones, ends eventually. Steve Jobs’s illness and death happened just as his utter triumph with the iPhone had become apparent. At the time, again, the consensus was that Apple was in deep trouble without its leader at the helm. And once again, those who were skeptical about the future of Apple were proven to be wrong. Really wrong.

The Tim Cook era was–it feels a little weird to start using that in the past tense, but here we are–all about growth. Cook was never going to be Steve Jobs, and to his credit, he never tried to be. Cook’s successes are all about managing the unprecedented growth and success of Apple’s products, driven primarily by the incredible popularity of the iPhone.

In hindsight, it was the perfect match of the man to the moment: Cook’s entire being seems focused on keeping the supply chain humming, innovating in manufacturing processes, and pressing the advantage with in-demand products. Cook led Apple through a period when it could’ve fumbled its opportunity with the iPhone, and there was no fumbling to be seen.

The moment the iPhone really took off and went exponential was in September 2014, when the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus signaled Apple’s embrace of the larger phone styles that Samsung had proved were appealing to consumers. It’s also probably the moment Cook is most proud of, because it also marked the launch of the Apple Watch, the most consequential new product released during Cook’s tenure.

The next chapter

It seems like my own personal milestones tend to happen alongside Apple’s pivot points. I arrived at Macworld when Apple was lost, and I departed just as it zoomed further into the stratosphere. The day after Apple launched the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch was my last day as a full-time employee at Macworld.

Fortunately, I had time to prepare, so I launched Six Colors, where I’ve been writing about Apple ever since. And Jon Phillips and the other excellent people at Macworld immediately asked me to come back and write More Color starting in early 2015. In my Macworld afterlife as a contributor, I’ve turned in nearly 500 columns over the last 11 years, extending the presence of my Macworld tenure to 29 years.

We’re at a new pivot point now. And while I’ve spoken to Tim Cook a total of one time–I said hello at WWDC 2027 because he sat down right in front of me at the company’s live AI “tech talk”–I’ve talked to incoming CEO John Ternus a lot. He’s different from Cook in so many ways, and that’s a good thing. Apple has been incredibly successful for a long time, and when you’re that successful, it makes it easy to ignore organizational problems or blind spots, because why mess with a good thing?

Ternus doesn’t need to use a wrecking ball on Apple, and he won’t, but he has the opportunity to survey how the company does business and make needed changes. He’s been at Apple for a quarter of a century, rising up in the hardware group over the years; surely, along the way, he’s noticed a lot of things that Apple could change and improve on.

In fact, that brings up what makes me most enthusiastic about Ternus coming in as CEO. Tim Cook is a business-school guy who was recruited by Steve Jobs because Apple desperately needed someone who could create a disciplined supply chain and manufacturing organization. That wasn’t Jobs’s forte, so he made a great hire in Cook. But while Cook seems to have truly embraced Apple and what makes it special, he’s always been a high-level exec focused on specific areas of Apple’s business.

Ternus isn’t like that. He’s a lifer at Apple. He came in at the ground level. He is one of us, at least in the sense that I think he viscerally understands what makes Apple’s products appeal to its customer base. He’s been closer to the nuts and bolts of what makes Apple work than Cook ever was. Having a CEO with that perspective will be good for Apple, at a time when the company seems to have conquered the world–but is now struggling to adapt to some rapid changes in the tech industry.

A new pivot point for Apple? Seems like a good time for a new pivot for me, too. This year has been full of milestones for me, from appearing on “Jeopardy!” to reviewing David Pogue’s book about Apple for The Wall Street Journal, to crowdfunding a new podcast about Apple History (see below). Along the way, I’ve had to say goodbye to some longstanding projects.

That’s my long way of saying that this is my last More Color column at Macworld. Thank you so much to everyone at Macworld for the chance to keep my name attached to this brand for an additional 11 years on top of the 17 I spent in my first life as an editor. Thanks to my editor, Roman Loyola, who was already working at MacUser magazine on my first day there in 1994 and is somehow still working with me. And thanks to all of you for reading my words here over the years. I’ll keep bleeding six colors, and I know that you will, too.